Dark hole of Data

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Dark Hole of data approaches

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6265976.stm

Its funny how they are just concerned with this now.

 

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Er - 'now'? This is a recurring whinge from archivists, which I first saw about 15 years ago.

Mind you - they aren't wrong about the problem. It is just that nobody seems to care.

I have a big database of familiy info on a 10 year old machine under a DB that nobody has heard of these days. I've been promising myself to get it shifted to a modern machine for about 5 years now. Somehow I never get the time to do it. :-(

Harry.

 

Yeah it always seems to be the way, I must backup these files soon or got to get these old files to work but as you say you never get the time.

But I bet there will be people who have lets say just got married recently and they will have their 'photos of the big day' stored on their new pc, but what happens in 10 years time when MPEG will obviously be outdated and some new fangled image compression software is introduced that does not support it.

I have always thought that there should be more emphasis on new technology wether it be hardware or software having the ability to use old formats and be able to update those old formats wether through patching or some other means to the newer format.

But it always seems to be these days this is the new format for imaging software forget about that old tat you used before.

I mean I am going slightly off topic here but look at DVDs now it Blue Ray and Hi DEF I dont think either will be around long enough till some newer better movie format comes out

 

Spot on. The snag is that the public largely don't care - until it is *their* wedding day pics that are unviewable!

Harry.

 

Ugh

That cow from the National Archives used to be my boss. I got tales about her that would make your skin crawl...

 

I take it these tales are not for public consumption?

 

but as long as there is a demand to*recover* these items and there are IT techs able to do this, then the general public wont care, its the same thing as VHS > DVD.

 

The thing is though anyone with half a brain and a dvd recorder should be able to figure out that if they connect their VHS player to the dvd recorder then they'll be able to transfer the VHS tapes to DVD.

I mean I'm no brain of Britain but it was the first thing I did when I got my DVD recorder.

 

Do tell

 

No. Nothing insalubrious, but let's just say that there were some (ahem) 'Industrial Relations issues' I'd rather not go into here...

Suffice it to say that she talks a good game in public, but in reality, she doesn't treat her staff that well.

 

Well most people crawl up their own arse when they think they are at the top.

 

A

and most of the time it is the useless ones that get promoted then shunted sideways to become someone else's problem

 

That could have a reason. If you get them out of the "production" environment and you can not sack them, promote them away so they can not harm you anymore.